I remember the day I got my first walkman as it was yesterday. You
can't imagine the goy I boy living in a small comunist country in
Eastern Europe can feal, to be one of a blessed few who own a device
most have not even seen yet. It was a far cry from todays models. It
could only turn one way, so there was no rewind button, the speed
controll was far from being precise, I could hear quite clearly the
interference from the brushes of the DC motor inside and more often
then not it would wrinkle my tapes. The worst probably was that it ran
just 30 or so minutes on two quite expensite bulgarian made carbon AA
bateries.
Sony has gone a long way since then. Now I own a Sony Hi-MD walkman
that runs so loing on it's internal battery that I never manage to keep
track of how long it was since I charged it.
Since I got my first MD walkman I have been a fan of the technology.
And there are many reasons for that. First I am one of these people
that can actually hear the horible sound an MP3 makes. It seems to me
the people that developed the MP3 audio compression technolgy never
intended it to store music. Some of the most important features of ths
kind of media would be gapless playback for example. (imagine listening
to a piano performance or a DJ set you would probably want to be able
to listen to the hole thing from start till end without interruptions
in the sound, and at the same time be able to go exactly to a
perticular part of the performance. With CDs and MDs this is possible,
with MP3 files it's not)
The removable disk is not such a problem any more, as the MP3 players
are produced with plenty of storage. But still you can go on a vacation
with your MD walkman and cary 500h of music on just 10 disks. And last
but not least, the MD walkman is a high quality music recording device.
But the MD walkman is dead. Read on to find out why.
My first MD walkman could store 80min max on a single MD. It ran a
little over 20h on an AA size battery in playback mode, or only about 3
hours in recording mode. There were two ways to record by disk: the
analog line in and digital optical SPDIF line in. The latter was the
only way my walkman could place track marks automaticly. I got a sound
card with an optical SPDIF out and was very happy with my walkman.
The second model I had, had one major improvement. In addition to the
ATRAC3 mode recording, it supported ATRAC3 LP mode, which gave me up to
4 times the recording capacity on a disk. The battery life was improved
somewhat, but not much. Even though it claimed to be a "network
walkman" the recording was not much diferent then from the older model
- Sony had now bindled a USB sound card with it. But I still had to
title my disks by hand.
And now my newest and greatest. The Hi-MD model. Now this was a great
leap for Sony. They increased the media capacity 3 times - now 1GB can
be stored on the same size disk. The ATRAC3Plus codec was addes which
could encode 45h of music on a single 1GB disk and most importantly -
USB connection to a PC for, as Sony clamed "5 minute to record an
entire disk".
And here is when my trouble started. Even though I could use my walkman
as a USB storage device for my files, those files can not be played by
the walkman. In order to actually record music to it I have to use an
application Sony proviced for me - SonicStage. And it only works under
Windows XP...
Oh, wait, but I'm a Linux user. So in order to use my walkman I have to
but MS Windows also? Seems so... (You MAC users are in no better luck)
I install Windows on my computer and fire up Sonic Stage. Well, the
recording time is far from being 5 minutes for a disk, but I'm ready to
live with that... Just a small hastle, every time I want to record a
disk, I copy the music I wish to record to my windows partition,
restart, record and restart again. I should be finaly happy, or so you
would think... 3 months have passed and suddenly my Windows no longer
boots. How could I expect that if a person has MS Windows installed
they must not have an Internet connection or scores of "viruses",
"trojan horses" and "spyware" would climb on for the ride. Well
actually I knew that, but somehow I did not think it would happen to
me, being a computer programmer, etc.
So I reinstall windows, disable all network interfaces keep the old
routine... happy again. Untill Sonic Stage 3 arives. I downloaded it
from minidisc.org and installed it on my computer. It removed the old
Sonic Stage. But the new one did not work! It did not recognise the
walkman at all... then did I find out - there were many version of
Sonic Stage and they were not compatible. So a unit sold in Europe
could not connect to the software for a unit sold in the US.
I remove sonic stage 3 and install version 2 again. Guess what... no,
it didn't work. Somehow my user friendly Windws decided for me that the
new drivers were better I can not revert to the old once.
Format the windows partition, install windows, install sonic stage 2 and I'm back in busness.
Few months passed and I decided to give sonic stage 3 a second try.
This time the official version for my model from the Sony website. But
the installation requires Internet connection (just to make sure I'm
not cheating). So armed with few antivirus, anti-spyware programs and
enable the network a few short hours after I have a fully working Sonic
Stage 3.
I prepaired to record a disk, drag my files into it (some few fundred
songs) and .... surprised...Sonic Stage took my compilation and
"kindly" rearanged them alphabeticly my "Artist" and "Song name"... But
I had already aranged them the way I wanted! Who cares? Sony knows
best! I spent 20 minutes trying to find some sence of the mess! And
gave up on it... format again, windows reinstall and back to sonic
stage 2.
But the day I knew MD was dead was when I tried to give some of my
original music to a friend. I had a disk, over 3 hourls long, with my
own original live recording. I loved it, listened to it on my walkman,
enjoyed it.
I friend who also had an MD walkmen asked me to give him a copy. And I
did... connected my walkmen to his notebook computer and downloaded the
music to his computer.... Just after returning home I found out that
Sonic Stage would not let me copy my own music onto my own computer -
it had been copied to diferent computer already!
Then I knew - DRM had killed the walkman! And my music went with it!